Website Architecture Planning | Sitemaps

As a whole, Google News works to promote online journalism, and allow users to be exposed to many diverse perspectives. In this process, there are no humans that are choosing which stories receive top placements and which ones will be declined placement at all. The factors that determine where an article will rank on Google News are: the diversity of content, the originality of the content, rich textual content, and how fresh the content is. Additionally, there are technical factors that may affect the ranking of an article in Google News. These factors are: other relevant sites that link to your article, as well as accurate and descriptive title and alternate tags in the code for the news articles.

Extensions for sitemaps are an added syntax for certain media types that are contained within a sitemap. These media types would be images, videos, and other hard to break down content that is contained within the site, and the extensions are used to improve its indexing. A byproduct of the improved indexing, the sitemap extensions will provide information from tags on the elements to aid in making the website more accessible. In short, the extensions are used for content that is not just simply words or text in a default language.

Quite a few years ago Google announced the availability of annotations for websites that would target users in other languages as well as users that were physically in other countries. These invitations are representative of a conglomerate of quibbling pages that are aimed at users around the world. They were also implemented by using rel-alternate-hreflang linking elements in the HTML code of each page contained in the cluster. There is also support for specifying these hreflang annotations within the site map.

There are 9 sitemap formats that are supported by Google's Webmaster Tools. Sitemaps allow for a webmaster to inform various search engines about website links on a website that are available to be crawled. The sitemaps also provide information to webmasters about each URL in an XML file. The additional details include when the URL was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is when compared to other URLs in the website. This will allow search engines to crawl the site more efficiently. There are varying ways to generate sitemaps depending on the type of website or content that is being posted. This is necessary because content audits use the sitemaps to crawl, thus providing information on how to make it better. Allowing the correct sitemap types not only lends to a more successful website crawl, but also to better success in search engines.

Regardless of whether you’re a medical office, large e-commerce website or local small to medium sized business, both HTML and XML sitemaps are imperative when it comes to the absolute success of your website. In many ways, a sitemap is a map to your success, a list of pages that can take many forms including an HTML listing of page names, a list of all of the page URL’s, machine-readable XML and so on.

Now, since this article is all about how you can build the ultimate XML sitemap for your website I want to first briefly discuss exactly what an XML is. If you know anything about sitemaps you’re probably aware that two of the most common are HTML and XML. There’s a big difference between the two, however, and it’s recommended for each website to have both types of sitemaps because HTML sitemaps are designed for website visitors whereas XML sitemaps are intended for search engines and spiders.